The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (17 page)

“Damn your eyes!” Johnny sprang back with his hands to his face. Blood seeped between his fingers.

“
Devene un homme, Americain
. Be a man. I have left a piece of myself on every battlefield in Europe, and not a single tear. Did you not fight the rebel and conquer the red Indian?”

“Not personally. If Lee had armed his troops with contraptions like that, they'd be eating grits in Washington. Sometimes I think you forget we're only practicing. You confuse me with Bismarck.”

“Ha. If you were Bismarck, they'd be eating crepes in Berlin. You poke when you should pounce. That is a sword, not a knitting needle. We go again.
En garde!
” He leveled his weapon, hook akimbo.

“On your own guard, you Gallic Attila. I'm through for the day.” Johnny racked his épée and fished out a handkerchief.

Still, he progressed. He lost fat, although he had little surplus at the start, gained muscle, and straightened his posture; April commented on it at the end of his first week, before she learned what he'd been about. His reflexes improved rapidly, as they had to if he were to avoid decorating his face and torso with sticking plaster after each session, as he had after the inaugural. He was sore and sprained throughout that opening week, but ten days in he'd begun to acquire the kind of agility and economy of movement he'd only been able to affect onstage, naturally and without thought. Oddly enough, he first became aware of this not while fencing with Anatole, but on the ballroom floor, where a turn with the pretty daughter of a wealthy importer led quickly to her boudoir upstairs, where he could hear the violins still simpering below, and smell the smoke from her father's cigar in the sitting room of his chamber down the hall, where (she said) he was busy writing an eloquent letter to President Grant on the subject of tariffs. Johnny had never closed a seduction so promptly nor with so little conversation. Throughout that hour, he wondered at England's obsession with pugilism, when fencing was so much more rewarding. Monsieur Anatole was puzzled, and awkwardly pleased, when at
the end of the course his student presented him with a splendid gold Swiss watch engraved with the master's initials; Valèry scowled.

Much later, in another hemisphere, Johnny Vermillion would ponder whether he ought to have given him much more. A watch, however beautiful and well-crafted, seemed poor payment for a life even so discreditable as his.

Allan Pinkerton loved to walk. The wiry fifty-six-year-old's morning constitutional was the delight of those visitors to Chicago who refused to leave the city until they had caught a glimpse of the internationally famous detective, and the bane of those subordinates who preferred to meet with the chief in the library of a gentlemen's club downtown, in leather chairs with snifters at their elbows. He conducted these conferences on the trot, swinging his stick and covering several miles of park and macadam without loss of breath. Nine years hence, that walk would end his life, when he would trip, bite through his tongue, and owing to careless treatment develop a fatal infection, making his the only documented case in history of a man having bitten himself to death.

But in the late spring of 1875, the rugged Scot was in the glory of good health, and Philip Rittenhouse, who had balked at neither the misery of three days aboard the stage aptly christened the Bozeman Bonebreaker nor a week of dysentery brought on by the chicken and dumplings served at Ma Smalley's boardinghouse in Omaha, found himself hard-pressed to keep up with his superior. The trek lacked the adventure of life on the border, with a subtext of sadism on the part of its instigator; for the man who coined the phrase “We never sleep” secretly loved to torture those in his employ,
including the two who shared his blood. His sons, William and Robert, longed for his decline and their opportunity to remake the agency in their image, with due public obeisance to the old-world individualism of its illustrious founder.

Rittenhouse lifted his bowler to mop his bald head with a scarlet handkerchief, his only ostentation, and new since his Western sojourn—a sort of personal Order of the Garter for services rendered unto the goddess Justice. Those who called him the Reptile would gawk at the spectacle of his perspiring under any circumstances, including the old man's dreaded constitutional.

“I fail to see why you called me out of the office,” said he, “unless the prospect of deadly apoplexy looks better to you than paying my pension.”

“I ought to dismiss you for that. No one speaks to me so, including my sons. I sometimes wish they would.”

“They're in a precarious position. You might decide to leave the agency to the boy who cleans the water closets, and they'll have to go to work.”

“That is unjust. William at least is a top-notch detective. I know you've had your problems with him, but for my sake you might try to be insincere. I called you out here because I don't want to embarr-rass you in the hearing of your colleagues. Jim Hume has been after me over Sioux Falls. That was your assignment.”

“It still is, unless you've decided to take it out of my hands. Some cases take time to resolve, in spite of the lesson of those dime novels you write.”

“Those are case histories. There is a great deal more to the detective business than apprehending criminals. The good will of the public is an invaluable source of unpaid information, and fear of retribution is a deter-r-rent to crime.”

“Forgive me if I speak outside my station, but if we deter crime, do we not risk putting ourselves out to pasture?”

“I'm not hosting a debate,” Pinkerton snarled. “Where does the investigation stand at present?”

“All over. I know from newspaper advertisements that Evelyn and Elizabeth Mort-Davies are performing in California, but if they're breaking the law, it's in too small a way to appear in the news columns. Cornelius Ragland seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, but then he was barely here to begin with. John Vermillion and April Clay have vanished also. I suspect they're in South America, or abroad. They attract attention wherever they go, but the effect is delayed here by the separation of culture and distance. It's possible the Prairie Rose has disbanded permanently.”

“If that's the case, I advise you to swear out a complaint with the authorities in California against the Davieses and have them taken into custody. A rigid fare of bread and water ought to loosen the Major's tongue at least, if he's as fat as you say.”

“He may know nothing of the others' whereabouts; in which case the publicity of the arrest will drive the rest deeper underground. I said it's possible they've split up for good. Such a move upon our part would make it a certainty.”

“Suggest an alternative.”

“The theatrical season begins again in the fall. We have crimes enough to occupy us until then. Ace-in-the-Hole and Turkey Creek struck within a few miles of each other in Wyoming Territory just last month.”

“Each sustained a casualty, our confidential informants told me. Their luck has turned.”

Rittenhouse was surprised. “I wasn't aware we had informants there.”

“If I reported them to everyone in the agency, they wouldn't be confidential for long. We'll have ever-ry last man rounded up in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the Davieses may slip through our fingers. Swear out that complaint.”

They'd stopped to let a streetcar pass. Rittenhouse wiped off his scalp again and used the handkerchief on the sweatband inside the crown of his hat. Then he put it back on, reveling in the cool touch of the leather against his skin.

“Suppose we leave the authorities out of it for now and I investigate them in person,” he said.

“Your last foray into the field was not a resounding success.”

“I disagree. Before I made it, we thought a lone bandit had stuck up the Wells, Fargo office in Sioux Falls. Now we know the names of all the accomplices and have connected them with at least five other robberies, including one we didn't know about in St. Louis, which I suspect was their first. Thanks to reviews and advertising and my interviews, we know a good deal more about them than we do about Ace and Turkey Creek, not counting what you've heard from your phantom informants. Theirs may be the first criminal enterprise in history to employ the techniques of a press agent.”

The streetcar had moved on, but the strollers had not. Pinkerton turned to study him. “What could you learn from the Davieses that sworn law enforcement could not?”

“Nothing, perhaps. Everything, possibly; but only if I went inside.”

“Undercover?” The old man made an explosive noise, which for him was laughter. “Will you juggle, or sing opera, or teach a bear to dance?”

“Now would be an opportune time to inform you that my father was a theatrical booking agent on the vaudeville circuit.
He represented people who did all those things and more, and I ran his errands until age fifteen. If you'll stake me to an office in Portsmouth Square and a couple of hundred for advertising and promotion, I'll manage the rest.”

The voyage home was gentler than the one out. The sun was strong on the top deck, the motion of the waves soporific. In adjoining deck chairs, April half dozed over a book while Johnny sipped gin and bitters, a taste he'd acquired in London. A gull perched on the railing looking for crumbs and, detecting none, took its leave, flapping indignantly. The sound awakened April, who sighed and found her place on the page. Johnny peeped at the title stamped in gold leaf on the spine:
La Vie de Jeanne D'Arc
. “Research?”

She started a little and looked at him as if she'd forgotten he was aboard. “Mm-hm.” She resumed reading.

“If the ship's library has Shakespeare, you might want to give Anne Page a look. Remember, we're opening with
The Merry Wives
.”

“Mm-hm.” She turned a page.

“The Major will quite enjoy playing Falstaff, don't you agree?”

“Mm-hm.”

He drained his glass and caught the eye of a steward, who came over for it. Johnny ordered another. The steward asked Mrs. Mc-Near if she cared for anything.

“No, thank you.”

When they were alone again, Johnny turned onto his hip. “If you're disappointed about Rome, I'll make it up to you in New York: a suite at the Astor, dinner at Delmonico's. I understand Verdi has a new opera opening on Broadway. That's at least a taste of Italy.”

She said nothing, reading.

He reached over and tipped her book forward. “Your French isn't that good, dear. You've said more to the steward than you have to me. Is it Rome?”

She placed the attached ribbon between the pages and closed the book. “I don't give two snaps for Rome. That was your idea. Johnny, have you never thought of retiring?”

“From the theater? I'm only thirty-one.”

“You're barely
in
the theater, but you could be in it a great deal more. Denver is not so snobbish as St. Louis. If we played there three weeks, we could make as much as we took from any safe, and we'd not have to worry about arrest, or such horrible creatures as that fellow who assaulted Lizzie and ran us out of the country.”

“Perhaps. And where then? Someplace like Tannery, at fifty cents a head and all the hump steak we can stomach? You're letting a few complimentary notices turn your head. We're far more successful desperadoes than thespians.”

“We could be better if we kept to it. If we spent as much time rehearsing Corny's plays as we do preparing to commit felonies, we could put the Booths to shame. As it is we have some talent and only adequate skill.”

“Bravado, certainly, and most of that onstage. You mustn't be discouraged by a couple of minor setbacks. Look at those guerrillas the Jameses and Youngers, hunted in every corner of the land. The Pinkertons and the railroad detectives don't even know we exist. Anyway, you knew the risks when you threw in with me.”

She turned upon him the full force of her eyes. “We could be Mr. and Mrs. John McNear in truth. That's your real name, after all. You must have realized by now how fond I am of you.”

“My father had a buggy horse he was fond of. That didn't stop him from having it shot when it broke a leg.”

“Why must you bring your father into every serious conversation? He's dead, dead, dead!”

It was only the second time in their acquaintance he'd known her to display so much emotion without an audience looking on.

“Well?” she demanded.

“I wish—” He broke off.

“What do you wish?” she whispered, touching his arm. He felt an electric crackle: St. Elmo's Fire, not uncommon in open seas.

“I wish I were actor enough to know when you were performing.”

Her expression did not change so much as congeal into something he could not hope to penetrate. She withdrew her hand.

“Well, we don't dock for a week. We'll discuss this again.” She opened her book and returned to Joan of Arc.

The steward cleared his throat. It was Johnny's first intimation he'd returned from the bar. He turned back and accepted his drink.

“Lifeboat drill in fifteen minutes, sir. Will you be participating?”

Johnny squinted up at him. The sun was at his back. “Do they actually lower the boats into the water during the drill?”

“No, sir.”

“In that case, the answer is no.”

“Very good, sir.” The steward bowed and left.

IV